Google is reportedly enabling spam protection for some users through a server-side update.

Key Highlights:

Google is said to be activating Spam protection feature on its Messages app

The new feature is reportedly being enabled via a server-side update

The spam protection feature could be rolled out soon for everyone

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Google is reportedly enabling a new spam protection feature on its Messages app for some users. Android Police reports that some users who launched the app were greeted with a notification stating, “New! Spam protection” and it seems that the new feature, which is said to have been under development for more than a year, is finally being made available. As of writing this article, Google has not posted anything regarding the spam protection rollout and the feature is reportedly being enabled via a server-side update and only for a few people. We checked for the option on some of our devices but they have not received it yet.

As per the report, those who have received the spam protection feature on their Messages app will see a new “Spam protection" option under the Advanced tab of the app’s Settings. Earlier, Android Police reported a section on Google’s Support website that detailed how the new feature works. “When the setting is enabled, some information about the messages you receive (such as inbound phone numbers) is sent to Google, though stripped of identifying content like your phone number or the actual message itself. The inner machinations are undescribed, but presumably, it looks at that data statistically to determine commonalities between spam messages to detect them,” the report reads. In case one sends a spam report manually, the feature still submits the entire message to Google, which is said to include phone numbers of both, the sender, the recipient, along with the message's contents.

Speaking of the Messages app, new commits found in Chromium’s Gerrit source code management site suggest that the web interface of the app could be moved from Messages.Android.com to Messages.Google.com. While the URL change might not seem like a big deal for the average user, the change is said to tell Chromebooks to stop using the Android.com URL and instead use the Google.com URL in versions 72 or 73 of Chrome OS. These versions are also said to include the ‘Better Together’ features for integrating Android and Chrome OS. This change should not affect the web interface of the app.